A day after Sudan declared a state of emergency along its border with recently independent South Sudan, the south said that Khartoum bombed an oil region in another disturbing sign of the escalation of hostilities. From Reuters:

Weeks of border fighting have raised fears Sudan and South Sudan could return to all-out war, after failing to resolve a string of disputes over oil revenues and border demarcation.

Philip Aguer, spokesman for South Sudan's army, the SPLA, said Sudanese forces had bombed Panakuach in Unity State.

"There was bombing in Panakuach yesterday. Not less than four bombs were dropped," Aguer said, adding there had been no reports of casualties.

There was no immediate comment from the Sudanese army.

South Sudan has accused Sudan of using its warplanes to bomb its territories. Khartoum has denied it, though it has said it reserves the right to use air strikes in self-defense.

Unity State has come under repeated bombardment over the past week, and an air strike in its capital Bentiu last Monday killed two people.

The UN is debating what to do about the tensions, but to me whatever they do the writing is on the wall: Sudan didn't want South Sudan to gain its independence, and will stoke whatever discord it needs to over still-disputed regions and oil revenues in response.

(Photo by Kazuhiro Ibuki - Pool/Getty Images)

After shooting to Internet superstardom and greater global recognition, the hunt for Lord's Resistance Army rebel leader Joseph Kony continues as before, but at a more publicized pace. International forces, including a hundred U.S. special ops troops, are aiding in the Central African hunt for Kony, wanted for kidnapping children to use as soldiers and other war crimes, and his band of some 300 fighters. An interesting story in The New York Times about being on the trail of one of the world's most wanted men:

Their biggest challenge, they say, is Mr. Kony's turf, a vast expanse the size of California in the middle of Africa that is so rugged it renders much of the American gadgetry useless. Picture towering trees that blot out the sun, endless miles of elephant grass, and swirling brown rivers that coil like intestines and are infested with crocodiles; one of them recently ate a Ugandan member of the force.

"This is not going to be an easy slog," said Ken Wright, a Navy SEAL captain and the commander of the joint American detachment assisting in the Kony hunt.

Still, in the past several months since they arrived, the Americans say Mr. Kony's army of around 300 fighters is showing cracks. No longer is Mr. Kony able to direct the massacres he directed just a few years ago when his fighters waylaid entire towns and hacked hundreds of people to death. His armed acolytes are breaking up into small, desperate groups, American officials say, and for the first time they are abandoning many of the women and children they had abducted who cannot keep up as they flee deeper into the bush.

...The Central African Republic would be an excellent place to disappear. Its national army is one of the region's smallest and weakest. Its terrain is primordially thick. And its infrastructure is shambolic.

Because there are so few roads and telephones, it often takes weeks for news of an attack to reach the fusion center. By the time the Green Berets sift the information and help dispatch the Ugandan hunting squads, Mr. Kony is gone. The Americans say they never go on patrols themselves.

MORE: Behind the headlines in Africa

Encrypted al-Qaeda documents embedded inside a porn flick have revealed that the terror organization planned to attack cruise ships and carrying out Mumbai-style attacks in Europe. German newspaper Die Zeit first reported on the trove found on a suspected al-Qaeda operative arrested in Berlin last year. Here, details are shared with CNN.

On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.

Buried inside them was a pornographic video called "Kick Ass" -- and a file marked "Sexy Tanja."

Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence -- more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group's most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.

Future plots include the idea of seizing cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks by Pakistani militants that paralyzed the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008. Ten gunmen killed 164 people in that three-day rampage.

Terrorist training manuals in PDF format in German, English and Arabic were among the documents, too, according to intelligence sources.

Porn doesn't exactly fit the moral superiority claimed in al-Qaeda's famous 1998 fatwa on the West. The plan for the cruise ship reportedly would include dressing passengers in orange jump suits, as if they were al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and then videotaping their execution. Investigators believe that Lodin and a partner were sent to Europe to recruit more al-Qaeda members after training in the tribal regions of Pakistan.

MORE: Behind al-Qaeda

A quick update on the Syrian Revolution: The peace plan that Bashar al-Assad promised Kofi Annan he'd adhered to isn't coming to fruition. There's still a body count every day. Activists are frustrated beyond words at the seemingly glacial pace at which the global community is responding to stop the bloodshed. And United Nations monitors have moved in. What could possibly go wrong?

The response of activists to the fresh presence of monitors is interesting. It's helped somewhat, some told CNN, but it's also helping guide the Syria forces to the right spots to strike at the opposition. More:

The growing presence of U.N. monitors already has helped the situation in Syria, opposition activists said, though it hasn't completely stopped the bloodshed that has been a fact of life in the Middle Eastern nation for more than 13 months.

"Shelling has calmed, but this does not mean that the (Kofi Annan-brokered) peace plan has been implemented," said an activist in Homs identified as Saleem, who reported at least three killed Monday in that central Syrian city. "Gunfire, rocket shelling, mortar shelling and arbitrary arrests still occur."

Saleem credited U.N. monitors in Homs, a hot spot of the opposition movement and frequent target of government forces, with helping retrieve bodies left in the streets, in some cases for as long as 50 days. And in Hama, a Local Coordination Committees of Syria (LCC) member named Mousab said the situation in his city is "more quiet," while adding that civilians are not able to talk to U.N. observers because they are always flanked by government forces.

But Ahmad, another opposition activist in Idlib province in northwestern Syria, offered a sour assessment of the U.N. effort. Observers presence may stifle violence in the short-term, he said, but things can change quickly after they depart.

"Unfortunately, the monitors are like a guide for the Syrian regime: Wherever they go, usually people are killed after they leave," Ahmad said Monday night.

Despite Security Council hurdles from veto-wielding members Russia and China, the UN General Assembly passed in February a resolution condemning the violence and calling for an end to human-rights violations.

The Local Coordination Committees report 17 dead so far today across Syria.